Secret Rendezvous #2020

Secret Rendezvous By Kōbō Abe Juliet Winters Carpenter Secret Rendezvous From the acclaimed author of Woman in the Dunes comes Secret Rendezvous the bizarrely erotic and comic adventures of a man searching for his missing wife in a mysteriously vast underground hospital F

Title: Secret Rendezvous

Author: Kōbō Abe Juliet Winters Carpenter

ISBN: 9780375726545

Page: 309

Format: Paperback

Secret Rendezvous By Kōbō Abe Juliet Winters Carpenter

Secret Rendezvous By Kōbō Abe Juliet Winters Carpenter From the acclaimed author of Woman in the Dunes comes Secret Rendezvous, the bizarrely erotic and comic adventures of a man searching for his missing wife in a mysteriously vast underground hospital.From the moment that an ambulance appears in the middle of the night to take his wife, who protests that she is perfectly healthy, her bewildered husband realizes that things aFrom the acclaimed author of Woman in the Dunes comes Secret Rendezvous, the bizarrely erotic and comic adventures of a man searching for his missing wife in a mysteriously vast underground hospital.From the moment that an ambulance appears in the middle of the night to take his wife, who protests that she is perfectly healthy, her bewildered husband realizes that things are not as they should be His covert explorations reveal that the enormous hospital she was taken to is home to a network of constant surveillance, outlandish sex experiments, and an array of very odd and even violent characters Within a few days, though no closer to finding his wife, the unnamed narrator finds himself appointed the hospital s chief of security, reporting to a man who thinks he s a horse With its nightmarish vision of modern medicine and modern life, Secret Rendezvous is another masterpiece from Japan s most gifted and original writer of serious fiction.

About “Kōbō Abe Juliet Winters Carpenter”

Kōbō Abe Juliet Winters Carpenter

K b Abe Abe K b , pseudonym of Kimifusa Abe, was a Japanese writer, playwright, photographer and inventor He was the son of a doctor and studied medicine at Tokyo University He never practised however, giving it up to join a literary group that aimed to apply surrealist techniques to Marxist ideology.Abe has been often compared to Franz Kafka and Alberto Moravia for his surreal, often nightmarish explorations of individuals in contemporary society and his modernist sensibilities.He was first published as a poet in 1947 with Mumei shishu Poems of an unknown poet and as a novelist the following year with Owarishi michi no shirube ni The Road Sign at the End of the Street , which established his reputation Though he did much work as an avant garde novelist and playwright, it was not until the publication of The Woman in the Dunes in 1962 that he won widespread international acclaim.In the 1960s, he collaborated with Japanese director Hiroshi Teshigahara in the film adaptations of The Pitfall, Woman in the Dunes, The Face of Another and The Ruined Map In 1973, he founded an acting studio in Tokyo, where he trained performers and directed plays He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1977.

The back blurb describes this as satire I sincerely hope that nothing in the Japanese medical system can actually be appropriately satirized in this form, because this book is horrifying Secret Rendezvous is an unending psychosexual medical nightmare It certainly possesses its absurdity, but it s that grinning death mask absurdity that you don t want to meet on a dark night The images, the deranged philosophizing, the very idea of getting trapped in such an endless hospitalized underworld It s t [...]

How could I not like this Kafka check Beckett check Burroughs check And that easy going Japanese narrator later associated with Murakami check Oh, and of course being himself check too.I generally don t love books with huge libidos All the masturbating and measuring of penises might ve turned me off in another book What can I say I m modest, maybe repressed, who knows But this book seemed not to be so much about sex as the defamiliarization of sex in a modern bureaucratized, science obsessed wor [...]

As bizarre a book as I can imagine, but somewhere in the middle I started to find it gripping When they call stories dreamlike, people are usually referring to bizarre imagery or an ethereal atmosphere Secret Rendezvous is dreamlike in a literal sense, as it requires you to surrender logic to its own universe of signs and impressions This can be hard to do In the end, rather than a satire of the medical system which is what the book s cover advertised , it seems to rather be a nightmare of sex [...]

It warrants all of the Kafka esque descriptions it gets Unlike Kafka s characters, who never grasp the machinations of their world, the nameless main character of this book, at times, gets hip to the absurdity As he does, however, he becomes deeper entrenched in the labyrinth sex research hospital, until his initial goals of finding his wife and returning home to normalcy become completely lost The ending is still confusing me It s lucidly rendered and absolutely disturbing.

I think this is one of the better Abe books that I ve read, but I still prefer Woman in the Dunes and Kangaroo Notebook Maybe even The Box Man It hangs together better than some, but I m not necessarily as interested in where it goes Better than some, worse than others Or, maybe it just didn t strike me as much.

This absolutely has to be the strangest novel I have ever read How on earth Abe generated these ideas and had the gall to put them down on paper is beyond me We have a shoe salesman searching for his missing wife in a labyrinth of hospital, a horse man with two penises, a woman who turns into a quilt, an adolescent nymphomaniac whose bones are melting, and it s all wrapped up with a chilling denouement I m pretty flabbergasted at the moment.

This book is often compared with The Trial by Kafka, and like that book, I d say that this one is strange, messy, and brilliant, weaving a tapestry of complex and sometimes perplexing themes around a simple enough premise a man navigating a labyrinthine hospital in search of his wife who was taken there by two EMTs in the middle of the night There s a noir vibe to the investigative aspect, and the book definitely shares some DNA with Cronenberg s Videodrome with its body horror element and presc [...]

I liked parts of this The parodies of hospitalization and medical fear were compelling, funny, scary But it falls back on this trope of using women s bodies and sexuality as a device for body horror in a very problematic and brain dead way Basically the Harlan Ellison problem So fuck that, but I would still be up for reading the Ruined Map or Box Man, I think.

i read this because the theater company i was working with was adapting it for a show i d never heard of Kobo Abe, but we all read a number of his works in preperation for this piece and i m really glad i was introduced to his work i haven t read Woman in the Dunes which is his most famous, but i have to say i was really drawn into Secret Rendezvous it s incredibly bizarre and i always wonder with the Weirdness of east asain art and Japanese art and culture in specific how much of my imcomprehen [...]

I found this work to be even stranger than his Kangaroo Notebook With Kangaroo Notebook, the reader can easily distinguish the hellish underworld from the realness of the world above, at least to a sufficient degree On the other hand, Secret Rendezvous merges the real with fantastical and farcical elements in such a way that leaves the reader perplexed The former is fully bathed in absurdity, while the latter is only wet up to the waist.The first scene begins with a bizarre occurrence, when a ma [...]

Here the Hospital is the cite of Abe s existential mayhem nary a chapter goes by where someone isn t watching someone else do it with themselves, an animal, or one or other human beings That this is a novel about sex and sexual deviancy and that takes place increasingly hellishly within the power structure of a hospital tremendously foregrounds the repercussions of treating desire as a strictly physical phenomena that must be treated systematically Anyway, while one senses that a lot of whateve [...]

I think it is a wonderful concept and a great effort but really taps into some deep surreal themes very matter of factly which creates confusion than closure We re lead on a wild goose chase looking for a man s missing wife in a hospital whose director is a man who is also a horse during his search the husband becomes head of security There are many erect penises, sexual experiments and an orgasm contest for entertainment but the back of the book review says it is a mix of Hironymous Bosch, Fra [...]

Intrigued by the cover I grabbed this book right up and off of a dusty shelf in a used book store On a whim, I do things like this sometimes I didn t even read a darned page in the thing, I was just intrigued by the cover I shoved my ten dollar bill towards the teller and on my way I went I don t know why I did it but I m glad I did This one kept me company on many a long train rides to and from my home and my homehome for a short while and is probably one of my favourite novels and a damn fine [...]

5 5 stars for writing, but 3 5 stars for abundance of sexual deviance a theme I generally find pretty boring, with no exception here Looking beyond the sexual themes, I really enjoyed this book and found the pacing swift and engrossing As a thriller, there is an excellent execution of information being revealed that then opens up new mysteries I trusted that all would be known, in time, and went along for the ride This is my first time reading Abe, and I will definitely read him again, hopefully [...]

After falling in love with the Abe Teshigahara film collaborations I was very eager to read some Abe I think this was the wrong book with which to start Disappointing to say the least The only truly interesting construct, the tape listening room, was sorely underused Kafka Brecht isms aside, I found the book so vague and ungrounded, the protagonist a blank slate with seemingly nothing truly at stake, and the most boring sex torture liberation hospital imaginable Perhaps I missed the grand pictur [...]

The story sounds straightforward enough missing wife, husband following clues to find her However being a Kobo Abe book it was never going to be that simple The narrative swaps from 1st to 3rd person and back again, everyone is holding something back and the story keeps jumping forward and back Most of the characters are extremely odd, complex and interesting The story is very gripping and weird.

This was the first book of Mr Abe that I ve ever read and it never failed to expose the unique weirdness of the story s concepts In a simple yet seemingly bland narrative and potent frankness on medical practices, the story s absurdity, for me can both symbolize and criticize anything in reality In a symbolic way, you can interpret the labyrinthine hospital as a future world, a world where somebody supplies and shares someone of sensual affection The man portrayed on the story was initially take [...]

Abe was Japan s answer to Kafka His novels often focus on the mutability of identity and the existential absurdity of modern life In Secret Rendezvous he turns his aim towards the modern medical profession Doctors and patients are caught in an absurd, masochistic, mutually parasitical relationship No one is cured, though whether anyone is really is sick in the classic sense is also questionable Our narrator s wife is carted off by an uncalled ambulance neither of them is rude or assertive enough [...]

Interesting mix of dark and absurd After reading it, I started enjoying of its dream like world, but while reading, it wasn t a very enjoyable experience The style of narration forces us to try our best to reconstruct what really happened, but at the same time the absurdity level keeps going up It does have the quality of being shocking and it might have worked better 40 years ago, but contemporary readers won t be too impressed by craziness or weird sex and there wasn t much .

Absurdist, erotic and at times political, this book is a really strong view of the way health is treated as a bussiness and how it changes and deteriorate the minds of the people involved, through a story filled with dark atmosphere and bizarre imagery The controverted author works as a psychosexual criticizer of modern society in this book Very mysterious and shady, satirical and comic a unique tale which will leave the reader with a vacuum inside the chest by the time he finishes it.

Unless you are a die hard fan of Kobo Abe, you might want to pass on this one Eccentric, phantasmagorical, somewhat smutty, and Kafkaeque it is, but for me it was also fundamentally lacking in dramatic tension Such humour as there was, I had to disinter carefully from its shallow, cliched grave.